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SYNDICATED COLUMN: LBO No Mo

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Ted Rall


Stop Speculators From Ruining Strong Companies

The Crash of ’08 offers the incoming Obama Administration a rare chance to rein in the excesses of our economic system. I can think of few better places to start than banning leveraged buyouts.

Leveraged buyouts (LBOs) are Wall Street’s solution to American capitalism’s dirtiest secret and biggest problem: no one has any money. Really. Working as an investment banker during the 1980s, I was repeatedly astonished when deals would fall apart because would-be buyers of major corporations didn’t have enough cash on hand to buy a house in the Hamptons. Many of the wealthiest people in the world, it turned out, have zero or negative net worth. According to The New York Times, for example, one of Donald Trump’s biggest sources of income was his job hosting the TV show “The Apprentice.” Those buildings with his name on them? He leased his name to developers who liked his brand.

It’s true: the rich are different than you and me. But not because they’re rich. If most “wealthy” people ever had to settle up with their creditors, they’d be worth less than the average homeless Iraq War vet. What they do have—or, until recently, had—big lines of credit.

LBOs are a way for cash-poor “rich” people and corporations to buy companies they can’t really afford. First the would-be acquirer buys enough stock to get controlling interest in the targeted company. A bank lends him the rest of the purchase price, using the purchased company’s own assets as collateral. Overnight, a profitable company with a healthy balance sheet can find itself burdened with staggering debt—its own purchase price.

Now the corporate raider owns the company. But the company owes big payments to the bank. The raider has two options. He can use his management skills to make it more efficient and profitable. Or he can sell off pieces of the company. More often than not, “turn around” experts find that they’re not much smarter than the management they replaced and end up selling assets and cutting costs. For other acquirers, turn-arounds aren’t the point. They’re out to gut the joint from the start.

The results are the same in both scenarios. Each sale of a division and each round of layoffs reduces the already cash-starved acquired company’s chances of survival. The formerly profitable company is forced to file bankruptcy. Its employees lose their jobs. Because the law inexplicably lets corporations use retirement plans as collateral for loans, they often lose their pensions too. Suppliers are stiffed. Customers suffer higher costs due to less competition.

It’s bad news for most people—but not for everyone. The corporate raider sells off his equity stake in the company before the fiscal excrement encounter the fan, then pays himself and his friends millions in golden parachutes. The bank, which collected high interest payments as the company began its post-LBO decline, seizes and sells off what remains of the company’s assets.

Here’s another way to look at it: Let’s say you want to buy a car you can’t afford, like a Rolls Royce. You “buy” the fancy hand-crafted auto using the car itself as collateral. When the payments come due, you sell the engine, tires, carburetor, CD player and other parts to a chop shop. You pocket the cash and default on your loan. This, of course, is illegal—yet in this scenario all that’s been lost is a nice car.

LBOs inflict much greater damage. They transform profitable companies into bankrupt ones, throw thousands of people out of work, stifle competition and deprive government of the tax revenues it needs in order to build schools, maintain roads, and drop bombs on Muslims. Yet LBOs are legal.

Generally speaking, LBOs succeed under two conditions: an expanding economy and a management team able to radically increase profits in a short time. These conditions are rarely present at the same time, and almost never for very long.

Signs that the LBO model was untenable began appearing 20 years ago, when two of corporate raider Robert Campeau’s victims, the Revco drugstore chain and Federated Department Stores, went bankrupt. Federated, which employed thousands of American workers before Campeau came along, had been saddled with LBO debt equal to 97 percent of its net assets.

LBO transactions have since led to scores of bankruptcies and hundreds of thousands of Americans losing their jobs—all to line the pockets of a tiny cabal of greedy speculators. The LBO goons’ latest victims, ironically enough, are the media giants lionized by their own business reporters in breathless puff pieces.

In 2007 Sam Zell, described as “a 65-year-old billionaire and president of Chicago-based Equity Group Investments,” bought the Tribune Company for $8.23 billion. Tribune was one of the largest media chains in the United States, owning The Chicago Tribune, The Los Angeles Times, The Baltimore Sun, 20 television stations, and other properties—as well as the Chicago Cubs baseball team. Like most “billionaires,” Zell didn’t have any money. Like most takeover artists, he didn’t know anything about the multibillion-dollar business he wanted to run.

Zell invested a mere $315 million (3.6 percent of the purchase price) and stuck Tribune with $8.4 billion in debt, promising to make early debt payments by selling the Cubs and turning around the company’s flagging newspapers.

Everyone saw trouble ahead. “The leveraged buyout is making Tribune one of the riskiest newspaper companies, according to John Puchalla, a media analyst at Moody’s Investors Service in New York,” reported the Bloomberg business wire service at the time. Now, a year later, Tribune has filed Chapter 11. Layoffs are coming fast and furious. After just 18 months under Zell’s careful stewardship, Tribune—formerly a profitable company—reports assets of $7.6 billion and debt of $13 billion.

“Factors beyond our control have created a perfect storm—a precipitous decline in revenue and a tough economy coupled with a credit crisis that makes it extremely difficult to support our debt,” Zell said, acknowledging the disaster.

Zell is right about the credit crisis. But it would have a lot easier for Tribune to weather the storm if he’d never come along.

COPYRIGHT 2008 TED RALL

SYNDICATED COLUMN: Smells Like Bob Dylan

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Ted Rall

Why Obama is Just Another Boomer

Barack Obama, people are saying, is the first Generation X president. Are they right? And if so–does it many any difference?

“The battle for the Democratic nomination in the U.S. presidential election,” reported Agence France Presse wire service nearly a year ago in January, “is as much about ‘Generation X’ wresting power from Baby Boomers as it is a battle between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton…Most significantly, analysts say, it is the first time someone from the so-called Generation X has run for the White House.”

A Gen X president is, or would be, a big deal. Xers’ major concerns–student loan debt, underemployment, age discrimination against the young, the environment–have never gotten much attention in the media or in mainstream politics. But is Obama Gen X?

Membership requirements for Gen X have long been fungible. Demographic purists say Generation X began with those born after 1964, when a sharply dropping birth rate marked the end of the postwar Baby Boom. Sociologists, who look to common cultural and economic reference points as generational signifiers, include everyone born from 1961 to 1976. If you grew up with LBJ, Nixon and Hendrix, you’re a Boomer. If your touchstones are Carter, Reagan and Molly Ringwald, you’re X.

Some analysts put Gen X as late as the 1981 birth year, but I side with Canadian author Douglas Coupland because, well, he wrote the book. When Coupland published “Generation X” in 1990, its subjects were twentysomethings. Do the math. That includes anyone born in the 1960s.

By any account, Obama’s birthdate–1961–barely admits him to Gen X. Yet Gen X won him the presidency. Sure, a higher proportion of Gen Y voters than Gen Xers supported Obama (66 to 52 percent). But twice as many Xers showed up at the polls. The One couldn’t have done it without the X factor.

Prominent Xers embraced Obama early in the process. “[Obama] attended an anti-apartheid rally in Southern California,” said “X Saves the World” author Jeff Gourdinier during the early primaries. “He writes about his doubts about the effectiveness of that form of protest…He is very honest about his skepticism. That is the Gen X sensibility.”

“Our time to lead has come,” gushed Elizabeth Blackney, a 35-year-old Republican blogger from Oregon. But she and the rest of my underemployed, underrecognized generation may have to wait. Now that Obama has our votes, he has a lot more love for Generation Y than for Generation X.

The Nation, the Bible of liberal Baby Boomers, is atypically smart on this point. “For Obama, who is 46, and his followers, Boomer politics clearly have to go,” writes Lakshmi Chaudhry of the 1980s and 1990s “culture wars,” which constantly rehashed Vietnam and other hoary so-last-century conflicts. “What is less obvious is whom Obama represents. He often speaks to the Millennials, recently telling cheering college kids in South Carolina, ‘It’s your generation’s turn.’ But rarely mentioned is Obama’s own generation, i.e., Generation X, the Lost Generation, whose name has been virtually erased from the national conversation.”

In my 1998 Generation X manifesto “Revenge of Latchkey Kids,” I called it “generational leapfrog.” Generational leapfrog is the tendency of the good things in American life–high-paying entry-level jobs, generationally directed social programs, free love–to jump from the Baby Boomers born between ’46 and ’64 to their children, Millennial/Generation Y types born after ’77.

It happened in editorial cartooning, my chosen profession. The vast majority of political cartoonists working at daily newspapers, those who get decent salaries and actual benefits, are Boomers in their 50s and 60s. If and when a new job opens up, it goes to an artist fresh out of college–a Gen Yer. Thirtysomething and fortysomething Gen Xers need not apply.

Demographers William Howe and Neil Strauss predicted this phenomenon in their 1991 book “Generations.” They argued that Xers belong to a “reactive” generation doomed to be ignored by everyone that matters–Hollywood, Madison Avenue and Washington. Like prior “reactive” generations (the last one was Hemingway’s “Lost Generation”), they will probably not see one of their own become president.

Howe and Strauss note that members of a generation can exhibit cultural signifiers and other traits more closely related to another generation. As a self-identified Gen Xer (1963/age 45), I spent my college years attending concerts by late-period Blondie, the Dead Kennedys, Flipper and the Clash. Punk rock and New Wave defined my coming of age. Like most of my peers, I later got into post-punk and grunge bands like Nirvana. But many of my classmates were more into the Doors and Bob Dylan. Born too late to enjoy the Summer of Love, they nevertheless identified as Boomers.

By this measure, Obama is a Boomer. His favorite music? According to his Facebook page: “Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bob Dylan, Stevie Wonder, Johann Sebastian Bach (cello suites), and The Fugees.” Yech. His favorite movies? “Casablanca, Godfather I & II, Lawrence of Arabia and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” Great films. I love them all. But a Gen Xer would have been more likely to namecheck “Repo Man” and “Slacker.”

Generation Xers who hope that one of their own is finally in a position to address their long ignored concerns had better believe this: Obama is paying attention to the young and the old. You in-between types, still paying off your college loans and facing discrimination in the workplace because of your age, will have to keep on keeping on the best as you can.

COPYRIGHT 2008 TED RALL

Finally

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Ted Rall

Today’s news contains two positive bits of news from the Obama transition team: first, he plans to ask Congress for a massive infrastructure construction program; second, General Shinseki will come out of forced retirement to head the VA.

Shinkseki certainly deserves vindication; he was one of the few Pentagon honchos to have the guts to tell Bush the truth about Iraq, that it would require as many as half a million troops to pacify the country. Rumsfeld forced him out for being right. Being right, however, is what matters–and Obama will need more people who were right in his cabinet. (Hillary, who was wrong over and over and over, on the other hand, should not have gotten the State job.) I’m glad to see him rehabilitated.

The infrastructure program is just what the doctor ordered–well, half of it, anyway. We need to put more money in homeowners’ pockets so they can keep their homes. Best way to do that: refinance all loans to a rock-bottom 2 or 3 percent fixed rate. Still, it’s a nice start.

Obama still has a long way to go before he loses his rep as a sellout. But this was a good day.

Why? Hello Kitty

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Ted Rall

Some of y’all have been asking why I draw Barack Obama surrounded by Hello Kitty ephemera. Well, here’s the cartoon that started it all, back on May 3, 2007:

Hope this helps.

Cartoons from 1992

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Ted Rall

I’m working on creating archives for this site that will include all of my syndicated editorial cartoons dating back to 1991, when I became syndicated. It’s a huge task. There are more than 3,000 cartoons, of which some 1,000 need to be scanned in because they predate my use of Photoshop. Each cartoon must be correctly formatted, of course. And–this is the cool thing–they’re all going to be keyword searchable. But that means entering the keywords.

So far I have 1991 and half of 1992 uploaded, plus the years between 2003 and the present.

Anyway, I was going through some old stuff from 1992 and was amazed at all the stuff I found that applies in some way to what’s going on today. Among them were the following two:

Obama to US Political Cartoonists: Drop Dead!

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Ted Rall

In my capacity as president of the American Association of Editorial Cartoonists, I repeatedly issued invitations to President-Elect Obama to deliver the keynote address at our 2009 annual convention in Seattle. Past speakers have included heads of state and the AAEC has often been invited to meet with previous US presidents.

Barack Obama, apparently, does not think we deserve his presence. In fact, he doesn’t think editorial cartoonists even deserve a personal rejection letter. Apparently, he doesn’t even know who the fuck we are–America’s preeminent and most widely-read satirists.

Check out this form rejection letter I received after my latest inquiry through Obama’s Transition Office website, Change.gov:

Dear Ted Rall,

Thank you for inviting President-elect Obama to your event.

The President-elect values each and every invitation, but due to his time constraints, he must decline the majority of invitations he receives. We have reviewed your invitation, and unfortunately, he will be unable to participate in your event.

Nevertheless, we hope that you will remain engaged in our emerging administration as you are the key individuals pushing our movement forward. As Barack said in announcing his candidacy, “[T]his campaign can’t only be about me. It must be about us – it must be about what we can do together. This campaign must be the occasion, the vehicle, of your hopes, and your dreams. It will take your time, your energy, and your advice – to push us forward when we’re doing right, and to let us know when we’re not.”

Thank you again for your interest and your understanding.

Sincerely,
The Obama-Biden Transition Project
Scheduling Team

Please note that replies to this email will not be answered

In this case, I’m going to with “not.”

Just to be clear: If he’s busy next Fourth of July, that’s cool. The point is, the least the Obama “team” could have done was to call me or issue a personal letter or offer a different date.

Let’s hope he doesn’t treat foreign leaders this rudely.

SYNDICATED COLUMN: The Rest and the Rightest

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Ted Rall

Obama’s Center-Right Cabinet Foreshadows Center-Right Presidency

A bunch of Clinton- and Carter-era hacks. George W. Bush’s leftover defense secretary. Of the dozens of Obama’s top appointments announced to date, there’s only one liberal: David Bonior, who ran John Edwards’ primary campaign, as secretary of labor. Maybe.

Remember the Democratic primaries? Among the top three presidential contenders, Edwards was the liberal. Hillary Clinton, she of repeated votes for war against Afghanistan and Iraq (and Iran!), was to Edwards’ right. Obama, who also voted for war but didn’t commit to Clinton’s bigger healthcare plan, was even more conservative than she. “Mr. Obama,” David Sanger writes in The New York Times, “is planning to govern from the center-right of his party.”

If nothing else, I had guessed, the U. of Chicago egghead would appoint a team of the Best and Brightest. We’re getting the Rest and the Rightest.

Asked by a reporter how his center-right coalition of Republicans, pro-war Democrats and other assorted has-beens squares with a campaign marketing hope, change, and Soviet-inspired propaganda posters, Obama pledged to “combine experience with fresh thinking.”

“Understand where the vision for change comes from, first and foremost,” Obama said. “It comes from me. That’s my job, to provide a vision in terms of where we are going and to make sure then that my team is implementing [that vision].” Pretty words.

Obama’s argument–that his center-conservative cabinet will carry out radical change if he orders them to do so–is denied by recent history. The U.S. government, as micromanager Jimmy Carter learned, is too big for the president to manage on his own. And, as George W. Bush learned after 2000, the people you hire are more likely to change you than you are to change them.

As governor, Jacob Weisberg wrote in his book “The Bush Tragedy,” Bush was fondly remembered by Texas Democrats as a moderate Republican who crossed the aisle to get things done. But campaign manager Karl Rove “used his influence to steer Bush away from being the president he originally wanted to be–the kind of center-right consensus-builder he was as governor of Texas–and into a too-close alliance” with the right wing of the GOP.

Even more fateful was Bush’s choice of Dick Cheney to head his vice presidential search committee. Cheney chose himself (!), then hijacked the would-be “compassionate conservative”‘s presidency by packing it with “neoconservative ideologues, who combined hawkish American triumphalism with an obsession with Israel,” as Juan Cole put it in a memorable 2005 essay for Salon. By February 2001 Cheney had already ensured that the Bush Administration would focus on international affairs to the exclusion of everything else. He also made sure that his aggressive, Manichean worldview would prevail in cabinet discussions. “Cheney had 15 military and political advisors on foreign affairs, at a time when the president’s own National Security Council was being downsized,” marveled Cole.

The moderate guy who ran against “nation building” in 2000 never stood a chance against his own staff.

It’s possible that Obama has stronger force of will than Bush. But, so far in the 219-year history of electoral politics, there is no example of a president successfully enacting radical changes without likeminded lieutenants to carry them out. Will Obama be the first to change his cabinet’s spots? Probably not.

“The last Democratic administration we had was the Clinton Administration,” Obama said in his attempt to calm his liberal base, which is starting to get hip to the reality that Obama is about to betray them. “So it would be surprising if I selected a treasury secretary who had had no connection with the last Democratic administration, because that would mean that the person had no experience in Washington whatsoever.” Or maybe not. What about Paul Krugman, the Princeton economist and Times columnist who won the Nobel Prize this year? He’s progressive. As a bonus, he’s been right about everything for years.

“We want ideas from everybody,” Obama continued. But not from liberals. And not from the socialists John McCain had everyone stirred up about. Speaking of McCain, the right-wing Arizona senator is tickled pink: “I certainly applaud many of the appointments that President-Elect Obama has announced,” McCain said last week. “Senator Obama has nominated some people to his economic team that we can work with, that are well-respected.”

What Obama and McCain consider respectable might not pass muster with polite company. Obama’s economic advisor Lawrence Summers thinks women aren’t good at math or science, which bodes poorly for the quality of his own thinking. Marie Curie, call your office.

Former Bush intelligence official John Brennan was, until last week, Obama’s pick to head the CIA. ABC News reported: “Brennan had been a top aide to former CIA Director George Tenet during what critics of the Bush administration refer to as that agency’s descent into darkness post 9/11, and he had spoken in favor of various controversial counterterrorism strategies, including enhanced interrogation techniques and rendition–sending terror suspects to allies where torture is legal.” After Congressional liberals threatened to block his nomination, Obama crossed Bush’s torturer off the list.

Lefties who swooned on Election Night had might as well get used to the truth: Obama isn’t one of you. Never was. Never will be.

COPYRIGHT 2008 TED RALL

Change Comes From Us

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Ted Rall

posted by Susan Stark

It will not be a happy holiday for the friends and relatives of Jdimytai Damour, who was trampled to death by shoppers at a Long Island Wal-Mart on Black Friday.

Unfortunately, this is what our culture has come to. People being sacrificed for the latest gadget while others in Haiti and Afghanistan wonder where their next meal will come from.

People bought the slogan of “Change” from Barack Obama, but the word “Change” was also the slogan of a one Bill Clinton back in 1992, and we didn’t get much change from him.

Ultimately, change comes from us, and us alone.

In this post, I’m going to list numerous ways we can change our our lives for the better, starting with our immediate surroundings. I did something similar on this blog soon after Earth Day, and it looks like I need to do it again. But this time, I’m going to add more information.

Let’s start by changing what and how we buy things:

1) Buy things that are USED, rather than new, as much as possible. For instance, the computer that I’m typing these words on is used. So is my TV, my fan, my lamp, my furniture, and many other objects in my room. Most of my clothing is used. To be fair, however, it is not always possible to buy used in all cases, but it’s worth a try.

2) When you have an item (or items) that you longer want or have use for, but can still be used by someone else, don’t throw it away. Sell it or give it to someone.

3) There is a website you can go to buy and sell used items. It’s called

http://www.craigslist.org/about/sites

At this site, there is also a “Free” column.

4) There’s another website that’s extremely useful in reducing waste:

http://www.freecycle.org/

At this site, you obtain or get rid of items for free.

5) If you have electronic appliances that are no longer working, you can recycle them:

http://www.epa.gov/epawaste/conserve/materials/ecycling/index.htm

You can also do a google search on recycling e-waste in your local area.

6) If buying something used doesn’t appeal to you, try to make sure that your consumption is Fair Trade. That is, that your obtained goods are environmentally friendly, with unionized or cooperative labor. I’m a hypocrite when it comes to this, because Fair Trade items are generally more expensive then items made in exploitive conditions. Which is why I go the used-item-route as much as possible. But for those of you who can afford it, there are these websites:

http://www.coopamerica.org/pubs/greenpages/
http://www.fairtradefederation.org/

7) In regards to Christmas shopping, everything that I mentioned above applies. Buy used gifts and/or Fair Trade gifts, and wrap them in recyclable paper (the comix section of newspapers makes great gift-wrapping). Buy a plastic Christmas tree (or even better, a used plastic Christmas tree) that you can use year after year. Same with Xmas decorations. And for godsake, don’t trample anyone to death. You don’t need that latest iPod, or whatever gadget Jdimytai Damour had to lose his life over.

8) A brilliant way to cut down on waste and and have fun at the same time is to go to a Really Really Free Market. If there is no such activity in your area, you can start one yourself. This is where you and others bring items that you don’t want anymore to a common space, and then take items out of that collection that one might want or need. It’s basically a big party dedicated to the concept of mutual gift-giving. Buying, selling, or bartering are forbidden at these events. It’s all gift-giving and gift-taking.

9) For the really adventurous, there is Dumpster Diving. Dumpster diving is rescuing what ends up in the garbage. You would be amazed how much other people throw things away. I have personally found many useful items, everything from stereos to bookshelves to bathtowels, in peoples’ trash.

Now we come to the section of Change Comes From Us dedicated to Reducing Energy Consumption And Saving Money On Your Energy Bill:

1) Make it a rule in your household that the last person leaving a room must turn off the lights before leaving.

2) Install night-lights in the hallways of your home so you don’t have to turn on the overhead lights. Night-lights use less energy.

3) Unplug all electrical appliances when they are not being directly used. Appliances use energy even when they aren’t on. The difference will show up on your electric bill, and you’ll be reducing your “carbon footprint”, that is, your oil, gas, and coal consumption.

4) Find out if there are any public transportation facilities (train or bus) where you live, and use them as much as possible. Even if you live out in the country, there is sometimes a county bus system you can use.

5) Start using a bicycle, scooter, or walking to anyplace nearby. You’ll keep in shape and save on gas.

6) If you have a gas-guzzling automobile, go online to see if you can’t get your car modified to use less gas per mile.

7) It is now wintertime, when we use a great deal of energy to heat our homes. Instead of jacking that thermostat up to kingdom come, dress in layers of clothing instead. I regularly dress in two layers of clothing during winter, minimum. I use more if it’s really cold. However, if you have an infant in your household, be careful when taking this advice.

8) When summertime comes around, use a fan instead of an air conditioner. Fans use a fraction of the energy that air conditioners use. Take cool showers instead of hot ones. And if you’re really hot, run your hair under cool water, then wring it out so that it’s merely damp. This should keep you cool for a couple of hours.

One last thing: While it seems a lot of effort to reduce energy consumption, you will, I repeat, will save money.

Now we come to the last section of Change Comes From Us. Presented here are miscellaneous things we can do to change things from the bottom up:

1) Do you by any chance have a lawn? If you do, turn it into a vegetable garden instead. It’s a better use of soil than simply growing grass.

2) Health care. Universal health care is pretty much a pipe dream here in the United States. No politician will touch it for fear of incurring the wrath of the health-industrial-complex (HMOs, drug companies, etc.). But you can get together with like-minded individuals and start or join what is called a Health Care Collective. That is, seeing what you can do to start a free clinic in your community, or finding health care professionals willing to provide free, reduced, or sliding-scale health care, or starting a community health insurance program. Here are some examples of this:

http://www.ithacahealth.org/
http://www.rockdovecollective.org/
http://www.cghc.org/
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=health+collective&btnG=Google+Search&aq=f&oq

3) Free schooling. You can get together with like-minded individuals in your community and set up a Free School, which Wikipedia defines thusly: A free school, sometimes intentionally spelled free skool, is a decentralized network in which skills, information, and knowledge are shared without hierarchy or the institutional environment of formal schooling. The open structure of a free school is intended to encourage self-reliance, critical consciousness, and personal development.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_school

4) See if you can set up a time-barter system in your community:

http://www.timebanks.org/

I don’t want this post to be too long, so I’ll stop here. Cut and paste this post and pass it on. It’s better than getting trampled to death.

Susan Stark

SYNDICATED COLUMN: What’s with the Somali Pirates?

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Ted Rall

Strange Inaction in the Indian Ocean

I’m the loudmouth pundit. I’m supposed to have the answers, or at least pretend to. This week, however, I’m baffled. Confused, even. So I’m turning the tables to ask you, dear reader: Why aren’t we bombing the crap out of Somalia’s pirates?

I don’t get it. You can’t build a house in Waziristan or throw a wedding in Afghanistan without drawing a blizzard of Hellfire missiles. We bomb aspirin factories, hospitals and schools. We employ bad-ass Special Forces types and psycho mercenaries who set up freelance torture operations and supervise mass executions. We Americans have our faults, but wimpy pacifism isn’t one of them. So what’s with these pirates?

In June 2007, a French warship witnessed the Danica White, a Danish merchant vessel carrying a crew of just five men, being hijacked by pirates off the coast of Somalia. The French, reported the Navy Times, “could not cross into Somali territorial waters to offer help.” Which is confusing, what with Somalia being a failed state without a viable central government and all. Who was going to stop them—the Somali coast guard?

Somalia’s territorial waters? Sacrosanct! Invade Iraq, invade Afghanistan, try to overthrow the president of Venezuela, send CIA agents into the Iranian desert to case their nuke plants, blast cars on highways in Yemen, no problem. But for God’s sake, leave Somalia alone! National sovereignty matters!

An American dock landing ship was also on the scene of the Danica White shipjacking. “The USS Carter Hall fired flares and several shots across the bow as well as several disabling shots at the three skiffs in tow,” said a navy spokesman. Across the bow? Why didn’t they blow them to smithereens? “But the hijacked Danica White made it into Somali waters and the Carter Hall had to back off and watch,” reported Navy Times. “We’re observing them at this point,” said the navy spokesman afterward. “It’s ongoing.”

There’s a lot of observing going on off Somalia. At this writing, at least 14 ships and 250 crewmembers are being held “a few miles off a 230-mile stretch of Somali coastline between Xarardheere and the town of Eyl,” reports The New York Times. These include the Sirius Star, a thousand-feet-long Saudi oil tanker, and a Ukrainian cargo ship carrying enough Soviet tanks, anti-aircraft guns and other weaponry to get you a start as a respectable warlord. An international flotilla, including American navy ships, are watching the situation—and doing jack.

We know why George W. Bush never tried to catch Osama bin Laden; he must have been worried he’d be captured alive and talk about his relationship with the CIA. But what do the Somali pirates have on Bush, the president of Ukraine, and the king of Saudi Arabia? What explains their reluctance to rain hot death on these privateers? Do the pirates plant hot Somali babes to seduce heads of state?

While we’re asking questions, why don’t ships that ply the pirate-infested waters south of the Gulf of Aden take security precautions? “For insurance and safety reasons, most crews on commercial ships do not carry weapons,” says the Times. Weird. You’d think the Ukrainians might have at least been able to break into their own cargo to shoot back.

So far the most delicious coverage of this uncharacteristic display of military restraint has been a Times article bearing the headline “U.S. Urges Merchant Ships to Try Steps to Foil Pirates.” The U.S. Navy, it said, was encouraging ships that travel near Somalia to employ “measures that did not involve the use of force” to avoid getting taken over. “The techniques,” said the paper, “include complicated rudder movements and speed adjustments that make it hard for pirate speedboats to pull alongside, as well as simple steps like pulling up ladders that some ships leave dangling for an entire voyage.”

Complicated rudder movements. Ladders that hang off the side of the ship. Duh.

It’s like seeing someone walking around with money falling out of their pockets. Maybe they want the pirates to come aboard. I’m no pirate, but even I would be tempted to take over a ship with a skeleton crew, unarmed “for insurance and safety reasons,” dangling its ladders. Such teases!

I understand why the Somalis do it. Piracy is big business in Somalia. In fact, it’s the only good business. Kenya’s foreign minister says Somali pirates have collected $150 million in ransoms so far this year. “All you need is three guys and a little boat, and the next day you’re millionaires,” Abdullahi Omar Qawden, an ex-captain in Somalia’s navy told the Times. What I don’t understand is why we, and so many other countries, put up with it.

In the old days, seizing a ship marked by a national flag was an insult and act of war. In 1803 pirates of the Barbary States, city-states along the north coast of Africa in the Mediterranean that were nominally part of the Ottoman Empire, captured the U.S.S. Philadelphia and held its crew hostage. President Thomas Jefferson asked Congress for and received authorization to dispatch sailors and marines to the port of Tripoli, where the ship was being held. To deny its use to the Tripolitans U.S. forces burned it and captured the city. It was America’s first foreign military operation.

We’re killing Afghan brides. We’re paying off Somali pirates. What has happened to us?

COPYRIGHT 2008 TED RALL

SYNDICATED COLUMN: Republicans, Not Conservatives, Are In Trouble

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Ted Rall

A Philosophy Without a Party

* Conservatives betrayed by GOP
* Traditional conservatism still popular
* Rigid laissez faire dogma rejected by voters

Conservatives think the election results prove that conservatism is in trouble. Actually, conservatism is fine. It’s the Republican Party that’s in trouble.

To be sure, the GOP got killed in Congress. But the presidential results aren’t nearly as alarming. The difference between Bush’s “big win” in 2004 (51 percent of the popular vote) and McCain’s “stunning defeat” in 2008 (46 percent) was that 2.5 percent of the electorate changed their minds. Besides, it remains to be seen, says Montclair State University political science and law professor Brigid Harrison, whether the “high level of young voters, African-Americans, highly educated white voters and a disproportionate amount of women forming a new kind of coalition” will come together in future elections to support Democratic candidates more typical than Obama.

For the sake of argument, however, let’s posit that Obama represents a dramatic political realignment and repudiation of the Republican Party. Certainly, Republicans do face massive demographic challenges, mainly as an influx of Latino immigration and naturalization turns places like Arizona, Colorado and California’s Orange County from red to blue. The GOP may well have to get used to losing. But that doesn’t mean conservatives do.

In the United States, conservatism is a philosophy without a party. Take Ronald Reagan, considered the patron saint of late 20th century conservatism. Coupled with extravagant military spending, Reagan’s tax cuts for wealthy individuals and corporations increased the national debt from $700 billion to $3 trillion, transforming the U.S. into the world’s biggest debtor nation. Under Reagan, William Voegeli wrote in The Los Angeles Times in 2007, “government did nothing but expand. In 1981, the federal government spent $678 billion; in 1989 it spent $1.144 trillion. Factoring out inflation, that was an increase of 19% in real spending. Republicans never expected that Reagan would leave office with a ‘federal establishment’ one-fifth larger than when he arrived.”

George W. Bush campaigned as a “compassionate conservative,” but conservatism was as absent from his governance as compassion. He has increased the federal deficit from $3.3 to $5.9 trillion. Add in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq—estimated at $2.4 trillion as of 2007—and he will have put the country a staggering $5 trillion deeper into the hole. He hired 180,000 federal employees for a new cabinet-level department, Homeland Security, all to make you take off your shoes at the airport.

Conservative? Not these guys.

For the sake of my long-suffering conservative friends as well as the country, it’s time to unravel the conflation of conservatism and the Republican Party.

Why do I care? Simple: America needs conservatives—real conservatives. Deficit hawks, America Firsters and get-that-dang-guvmint-outta-my-bizness types are essential watchdogs of fiscal responsibility and personal freedom. Moreover, ideological diversity sparks intellectual innovation.

Traditional conservatism—to state the obvious, is there truly any other kind?—is, despite its flaws, an philosophy attractive to those who value the ideal of rugged individualism. Most recently articulated by Barry Goldwater after he retired from the Senate, conservatism is centered around small government, particularly on the federal level; its size, scope, and powers are kept to a minimum in order to reduce infringement upon personal liberty, keep taxes low, and thus encourage investment and free enterprise. Fiscal responsibility is the order of the day. Budgets must be balanced. Deficits are anathema.

Conservatives believe that free markets create opportunities for hard-working people to succeed. They won’t help you get ahead, but they’ll keep nosy bureaucrats out of your hair while you’re figuring out how to do it on your own. It’s a bit Darwinian, but consider the advantages: you’re free to do whatever you want in your personal life. As Goldwater said when asked about gays in the military: “You don’t need to be straight to fight and die for your country, you just need to shoot straight.”

If Bush had been a conservative, he wouldn’t have cut taxes without reducing spending. He would have been an isolationist. As Pat Buchanan says, America Firsters don’t rush off to invade countries like Afghanistan and Iraq that pose no threat to the United States. Bush certainly wouldn’t have authorized NSA’s domestic spying program, gotten rid of habeas corpus, or infringed states rights by taking control of the National Guard away from state governors.

Conservatism is far more appealing to the average American than the bastardized form that has driven Republican policy for more than half a century. In 2008 voters rejected neoconservatism, an arrogant brand of “exceptionalism” dedicated to preemptive warfare, defending Israel, and empire building at the expense of all else.

Republicans use pretzel logic to market themselves to conservatives. In 1988, Allan Ryskind, editor of Human Events, told The New York Times that Reagan had deliberately increased the deficit in order to starve future Democratic administrations of money. “It has certainly put a lid on the welfare state,” he said. “The Democrats have sort of trapped themselves because they’ve said this is all terrible and horrible and that closing the deficit should be the first priority. The fact that they’ve said the deficit is such a problem,” he added, “prevents them from proposing new spending programs.”

Of course, it would also prevent Republicans—who remained in power until 1993—from cutting taxes, a principal tenet of conservatism.

Bill Clinton disappointed the Democrats’ liberal base, rewarding their support by pushing through welfare reform, NAFTA and the WTO. But if liberals feel used by the Democrats, conservatives have been raped by the Republicans.

This isn’t to say that traditional conservatives don’t need to change, in several areas. One is their intellectual separation of government spending into two categories: non-military and military, the latter of which is untouchable. Spending is spending, whether it’s on welfare queens or Halliburton. Another area is laissez faire, one of the few places where conservatism intersects with Republicanism.

When times are good, most Americans favor a small government that stays out of their lives and leaves them be. When a hurricane strikes, however, pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps dogma goes out the window. Similarly, government should run in the black during an economic boom. When people start losing their homes, however, they look to their government for help. Conservatives should think of themselves as firefighters. Most of the time, you never see them. Firefighters don’t break down your door with an ax unless there’s a fire. But you’re damned happy to see them when there is.

As much as Americans hate paying taxes, they hate do-nothing government more. (Besides, they’ve been burned so often on tax-cut promises that they no longer believe them.) One of the lessons of 2008 was that voters aren’t happy to let the marketplace work its magic if the world is falling apart.

A political party that stays out of people’s business while being nimble enough to jump into the fray during emergencies might just stand a chance. So might a conservative movement that refuses to vote for a party that repeatedly betrays them.

COPYRIGHT 2008 TED RALL

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